All the Feels

Last things first. Today's Facebook had everything. Friends getting awards, or being mentioned for them. Two families moving to Oregon. Every side of Black Lives Matter. Wimbledon. Bears fishing. Humpbacks breaching in SF Bay. Polar bears on an ice floe. Two former Peace Corps alumni who don't know each other both in Thailand. Emo friends being especially emo. Ice cream tours. A turtle which looks like a cross between a Terry Pratchett novel and the Rio soccer pitch. UK cousins suggesting weird ways to run a government, but probably not as weird as what's going to actually happen. Why HRC should be in jail. Why HRC is a goddess. Why Trump's finger on the button is irrelevant because Putin has fingers too. And smaller hands. Friends remembering dead parents'  birthdays. Friends remembering dead parents' yahrtzeits.  Puns. Faulty memes. Snopes - once in the morning does it. And so it goes.

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Prior to internetting, we had a rehearsal for El Capitan. The main reason I signed up for the chorus was the audition notice advertise that all the chorus would have to do was sit and stand at appropriate cues. Two hours were spent choreographing. Many chorus members volunteered to be onstage and dance, march or otherwise play active supporting roles which are not in the script. That's fine. But now in addition to very difficult music, the director is adding a multitude of arm gestures for the chorus. He thinks the show would be boring otherwise. He is man flavors of wrong.

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The afternoon was pretty boring. I mostly watched CFL games on Tivo, read, and ate coconut popsicles.

DHL delivered, unannounced, a must sign for package form Asia. I knew what it was, I just did not expect it till later in the week. He banged on the door after opening the screen. After he left, I tried the bell, and it didn't work. Turned out to not be the battery in the button, it was the three C batteries in the main unit. So now I have working door bells at both front doors.

The delivery was a Solmeta GPS unit for my Nikon. I have had two very expensive ones die on me in an annoying fashion - they use a USB-like connector to charge the battery and to connect to the camera, and it keeps failing to make a connection after a year or so. They finally made a unit with a solid cable, it gets juice from the camera, and is half the price and 1/4 of the features, none of which will be missed except the ability to quick disconnect the unit. I tried it out, it works as advertised, except it does not shut off when the camera is turned off. It continues to drain the battery. I just have to rememebr to unplug it.

In the mail was a ballot pamphlet for the biggest WTF election ever. August 16 special election to choose one of three people for my city council district's seat. That is the entire ballot!

I did a sort of a 2-fer around noon. Took the car to the wash. I was going to write "car wash" until it occurred to me that it would be redundant. I mean, what other kid of wash would I take a car to? After, I nipped across the street to one of my favorite massage places and was majorly surprised that the therapist was gorgeous. We had a great conversation about Asian languages, she knows more than I do about Chinese and Korean. She speaks perfect American English. I said she sounded like she was brought up here, but no, she grew up in Vietnam, and just has an interest in languages. Apparently most of her Vietnamese friends also speak like a native.  None of mine do. She found that hard to believe.

The morning started with a series of phone calls which I rejected, from places several states east. Email revealed that someone in Texas was needing a tester for the kind of equipment I am an expert in. Irving, Texas. It looked like another MLB opportunity.

Now that it is no longer feasible to retire to Thailand, maybe I should consider finding work in Oregon. There may be opportunities in my field in  Beaverton or Portland.

Plans for tomorrow:
Take the copter to the park
Hang out downtown
dinner with L&L so I can give him his DVDs and her some stuff from my garden.

Just when it was going so well

I was out at the park and doing well flying the quad copter, and had some good video on the SD card when the battery started running down. Got it into the air one more time, and lost it in the sun about 30' up and behind me. I cut the throttle, expecting it to come crashing down near the trees, but it was nowhere to be seen. After half an hour of looking, I gave up. It must be in a tree, not visible from the ground. There are a lot of tall Eucalypti where it disappeared.

Partly thanks to Prime day, and partly because it's one of the small cheaper ones, I ordered a replacement. I'm glad I hadn't put the 16GB sd card in yet.

Also on sale was a 480GB SSD drive, which I'll be using to replace the C drive in the main PC. Hoping that will speed things up.

From the park I went downtown, captured a couple of portals, and while I was walking the plaza, the phone rang two different times, both with recruiters to whom I had talked before, both with job prospects. The first one was not a match. They wanted a networking tech support/tech trainer. I'm not deep enough in networking tech to do that. The other was trying to shoehorn me into a job I would love to do, but the idiots wanted to give me a coding test as part of the phone interview, even though the job should not require any coding.

Went to Starbucks and sat outside while many attractive women walked by, I told the 2nd recruiter in a series of email messages that I'm not jumping through hoops for a manager who wants to treat me like a new graduate. I have too much experience in the field for them to do that.

So I'm still at a dead end in the job market after 4.5 months. My record is 5. I really don't want to break it.

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Job hunted online and walked back to the plaza using Pokemon Go. As zyzyly noted elsewhere, many of the Ingress portals are Pokemon landmarks. One of them had a note in the app saying it was a place to meet and greet, and about six 20-somethings were doing just that. All of them Asian. Which may or may not mean anything.

Home Depot, in search of a string trellis so I can get six pots of climbing plants off the kitchen table. Found something which should work, and also thyme and oregano plants which were surviving fine in direct sunlight.

Home, planted the herbs between the mint & rosemary. Tried to set up the trellis, but the space which was my first choice is way too small, and I need to make a compost run before I can use my second choice.

Facebooked and Gizmodoed to pass the time before my next appointment. Facebook was productive. A friend posted a photo shot in front of a green screen, and invited us to photoshop something into the background. He works at the computer history museum, so I found a photo of the Babbage engine up close.
Before:

After:


I had always wanted to know how to do this trick, and found a simple Youtube tutorial.

Next appointment was meeting L at Prolific Oven to give him the DVDs and to give his wife some garden herbs. Unfortunately she was working a double shift and could not make it. And he was barely on time, having interrupted handling a crisis at work, which he needed to get back to later tonight. He bought us dinner, and we had a good chat, and I'm looking forward to hearing if I made any mistakes on the DVDs and what his wife thought of the herbs.

Home, by way of a fast food drive-through across from Levi's Stadium for a chocolate shake. Had that when I got home because they are too thick to drink right away.

Watered the carport plants & the dwarf rose bush out front.

A couple of days ago we got a notice that the Annual Inspection will be the last week in July. I expect to be told the house needs to be painted. Because it does. Maybe tomorrow I'll call the company which did the porch carpet and see if they can do that. Maybe a lighter color. And there are boards which need to be replaced first. Maybe they also can do the landscaping in front (pull out the hedge and dump some topsoil). I'll need to sell some stock to cover that.

Received from Amazon: the Python pocket guide, and a replacement for the replacement GoPro latch. This time it fit. So now I have a working waterproof case.

Plans for tomorrow:
There may be a phone interview at 11. Or 4.
Do some Python coding
Peet's?
Boardwalk?
Check about the painting, etc.
Compost run & try to set up the string trellis.
Python class